Win7 partitions

[LeonW]

Hi Guys, I need help

I want to use a 500MB drive to keep back-ups of my laptop. Got myself a 500GB Seagate SATA drive, mounted it in a USB enclosure and connected to my Win7 machine. Used Win7 --> Computer Mgt to format the drive (quickformat) but can't see the drive in explorer. Having played with various options. I'm no longer shure of the partition set-up of the Win7 machine itself .

Before rebooting this Win7 machine, can someone please check / confirm / confirm with their settings that the partition set-up below is OK?
Am particularly worried about the System, Active and Boot settings

Is Win7 to boot from System Reserved or from C: ?
Is setting of System Reserved 'System' ?
Is 'System Reserved' the Actibe partition?

All partitions are on the same physical drive.
C: holds win7 and program files
D: holds my data

Win7 --> Computer Mgt --> Disk Management shows:

Volume . . . . . . . . . Layout . . . Type . . . File System . . . Status
C:. . . . . . . . . . . . . Simple . . . Basic . . . NTFS . . . . . . . Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
D:. . . . . . . . . . . . . Simple . . . Basic . . . NTFS . . . . . . . Healthy (Primary Partition)
System Reserved . . .Simple . . . Basic . . . NTFS . . . . . . . Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

Thanks
Leon

[bbearren]

Those look correct. Reboot the machine and see if explorer sees your USB drive.

[rmonroe36]

If I understand your plight, no drive letter is showing in Explorer for the external drive. Go back to Disk Management and make sure a drive letter has been assigned to your external drive. Shot in the dark is to try a different USB port on laptop.

Rich

[LeonW]

> If I understand your plight, no drive letter is showing in Explorer for the external drive.
Thanks for replying rmonroe, but my main worry *was* (is resolved now) that in getting the external drive to work I somehow managed to alter some of the partition settings of the Win7 machine. Was afraid to loose access to the system when some of the system/boot settings were wrongly assigned, on booting.

> bbearren wrote: [settings] look correct. Reboot the machine and see if explorer sees your USB drive.
Thanks for confirming that the settings look OK. Gave the well needed confidence to proceed. Spent half of today's afternoon to make an extra backup of the partitions (on the new external drive ); verified content; created boot cd with restore software; checked booting off the cd and verified access to the new backups; rebooted and kept fingers crossed. Machine came up as normal. Quite uneventful.

Odd that partition settings for Win7 are hardly documented. Google helped a little but the few screen prints found were were not consistent / made for other purposes. The settings mentioned in my initial post and confirmed by bbearen worked / must be correct.

Thanks again / issue resolved
Leon